What follows is a guest post by Reacting Board Member Trey Alsup, submitted in conjunction with ongoing REB conversations about game categorization within Reacting’s catalog.

By Trey Alsup

As the Reacting community begins the transition to the Reacting 3.0 changes, it is important to revisit the distinctions between the three types of games that exist within the Reacting catalog: Standard Games, Short Games, and Microgames. 

Long or “standard” games are complete Reacting games that take place over five or more sessions, with a session being generally regarded as a single undergraduate class period. Long games comprise the majority of our published catalog and remain the primary format for delivering the full Reacting experience. 

Standard Reacting games must contain these “core” elements:

• A real historical setting
• Rich texts and primary sources
• Roles with well developed characters
• Intellectual collisions at the center of the conflict/drama
• The possibility for alternative historical outcomes
• Five or more sessions
• “Short Games,” by comparison, require only two to four class sessions.
  
  

Whereas, “Microgames” are designed to be played in a single 60-75 minute class session. Microgames cannot require any advanced preparation by players.

First, let me say that many teachers and members of our community want Microgames. They want single-session games that can introduce their new students to roleplaying or act as a warm-up for a full game in the same historical period. Microgames are a powerful tool for onboarding new players, smoothing the transition that new students often experience when they first are thrown into the deep end of challenges that a Reacting game can present.

As Reacting ambassadors, we also want single session games to demonstrate the power of Reacting games quickly and easily to non-Reactors.  We need products where people unfamiliar with Reacting can jump into a game with no advanced preparation and still get a good sense of what a longer Reacting experience will deliver educationally. Microgames are an important marketing tool for converting the Reacting-curious to Reacting true-believers.

Short games, as I understand it, have faced a number of challenges as a format. In our history, shorter games have struggled to meet our publishers’ needs for physical publication. And without the physical books, many teachers, ironically, have a tougher time getting the materials for a short game in the hands of their students. I think many instructors might sometimes look at short games and decide that games with a longer schedule are necessary to meet all the educational goals that the longer Reacting games deliver on. Long games allow students to grow into their roles over time and learn from their mistakes. Long games also allow players the time to really explore the deeper ideas at conflict in the center of a Reacting game.

It is this tension, the desire by teachers and authors to a) create an exciting one-shot while b) delivering on all the core Reacting elements, that has resulted in a number of games that are labelled as Microgames that don’t actually meet the criteria to be a Microgame.

My thesis is that the line between short games and Microgames has been blurred and that many games categorized as Microgames would be much accurately reclassified as short games. 

Here are my recommendations for how we distinguish between the three types of Reacting Games:

Here are some additional considerations in my advocacy for a much stricter line of distinction between short game and Microgames.

My own experience coming from the live action role-playing world and the scholarship of the last couple of decades regarding how students learn using role-playing techniques has convinced me that we need to prioritize a structured  debrief in every game we make.

The debrief has always been an important part of any Reacting game. But recent scholarship has made it clear that debriefs are essential in order to structure reflection and meet the desired educational outcomes of a game. The debrief is where the “big lessons” from Reacting are reflected upon and absorbed by the players. 

“Participants who have not had the opportunity to process their experience learn less than they could or should, and thus not benefit from the espoused learning objectives of the game (despite having reached the game objectives).” - Crookall 2010

A debrief is also necessary just to establish “what happened” in a game played by dozens of participants.

A game debrief needs to be part of any game’s schedule. It is part of the game’s design. Some part of the debrief should be in person. In practice, the debrief is often the first thing cut when time runs short, especially if you are trying to cram a full Reacting experience into a single session window.

Debriefs have also been shown to be essential to meet the “safety” concerns of asking players to immerse themselves in another character and engage on an emotional and intellectual level. Players need the in-class debriefing structure to safely leave their historical character and return to the primary identity of their real-world selves. Players also need a debrief to emotionally distinguish their real-world classmates from the in-game adversarial identities that we need to leave behind in the classroom. We do not want in-classroom “bleed” to become on-campus conflicts.

Safety, in general, for role-playing games should be calibrated to needs of the actual game and subject matter. A Microgame should require minimal safety protocols, whereas more engaging long Reacting experiences are much more likely to require significant protocols and both the set-up and debriefing of the game. All of which is to say that a Microgame should remain relatively “light” in terms of immersion given the time constraints. And this might conflict with authors’ ambitions to engage with serious subject matter in a single session game.

All of which is to say that many Microgames leave no time for a meaningful debrief, or more likely, it's the part of the game that gets cut when, surprise, surprise, a Microgame on a tight schedule runs long.

Let me also suggest that Reacting games that teach history need historical review by our editorial board. Currently Microgames are edited and reviewed by our Microgame Coordinator not the editorial board itself. I think this is completely acceptable as long as Microgames do not actually present a complex historical scenario. But many currently do.

The current Microgame Framework is a big improvement over what we had in the past, but it still contains recommendations like a 5-10k word instructor manual and 300-500 word role sheets. That is a very strong message, an incorrect one in my view, about what a Microgame is supposed to be. It is a formula for getting more Microgame submissions that are better classified as short games. These requirements / recommendations are standing in the way of letting Microgames be a creative, experimental educational design space. 

In general, I don’t think speeches belong in Microgames. Speeches require preparation. Yes, players (especially Reacting Instructors) are capable of winging an impromptu speech, but it is highly unlikely a speech could engage with the ideas of the game unless the player was already familiar with the core concepts. They are not relying on core texts. They haven’t had time to read and absorb core texts. 

The standard for a Microgame really does need to be that anyone can walk in the door and play it fully in a single session. Our own attempt to make an entry level Reacting Microgame (adapted by me, Nick Proctor, and Jenn Worth), Fall of Athens, failed by this metric.  

So what should we do as a community? 

We should clarify the distinctions between the three game types and enforce those distinctions.

Current Microgames with substantial historical content and concepts should be reclassified as short games and should receive a new edition that includes a revised schedule and structured debrief instructions. What was previously a 75-minute single-session Microgame, now becomes a three-session Short Game with this recommended schedule:

• Session 1 - (partial session) Allocate role sheets and brief students on the historical context of the game.  Take-home reading of a few core texts is allowed (and recommended).

• Session 2 - The runtime of the game. Live-play of up to 60 minutes with at least 10 minutes of in-class debrief and de-roleing. A take-home reflection assignment is recommended (and provided).

• Session 3 - (partial session) A structured in-class debrief continues, reinforcing the core educational outcomes of the game. Some instructors may choose, after the debrief is complete, to lecture about “what really happened” in the historical scenario. 

This structure will ensure that even a “single-session of live-play” Reacting Short Game delivers on all the elements that make a Reacting game a Reacting game.   Microgames really are something else. 

And that might be my final, most heart-felt point: Microgames are an exciting educational design space that our community should be engaging with more. And I’m confident our community will author and employ new Microgames as long as that experimental space is protected from a framework that will unfortunately continue to generate Short Games mislabeled as Microgames.